In this podcast, Phil Harvey and I are joined by Chris Pearson, president of 5G Americas. Pearson examines how COVID-19 is impacting the progress of 5G in North America, shares his predictions for the rate of deployment of standalone 5G and the potential impact of 5G on the IoT market.

While COVID-19 is certainly changing business as usual for many organizations, Pearson says the pandemic hasn't slowed down progress on service providers' momentum around 5G – on earnings calls, many have expressed their continued commitment to deploying 5G.

In addition, North America is a leader "in terms of deployments, subscriptions and capabilities of their 5G networks," says Pearson. "Right now, we're at 69 deployments worldwide and, by the end of the year, we still expect 200. Some regions have stated that they'll be a bit slower in terms of roll-outs, but the US isn't one of them."

Pearson also shares his forecast for when standalone 5G will emerge, the potential barriers to commercial deployment and discusses a variety of ways 5G will impact the IoT market.

In this Mentor Spotlight, Edith Santos explains how NTT is addressing the cybersecurity threat landscape in light of COVID-19 and why enterprises need buy-in at the top to implement a successful cybersecurity strategy.

The Light Reading crew debates which industries could experience the biggest economic benefits from 5G deployments, if 5G can be considered a 'green' technology, the connectivity challenges New York City faces in reducing the digital divide, and more.

On this Light Reading podcast, Haugh provides an update on the evolution of enterprise network automation and how Gluware uses software-defined networking concepts to 'treat the underlying network infrastructure as code and then interact with it programmatically.'